Saving and Reloading
Narrat supports automatic saving and reloading, but there are some important details worth knowing about.
How saves works:
- All relevant bits of the state are extracted into one object. This includes
- On game load, the local storage gets read for a save, and if present all the data above gets placed in the state to continue playing
Because there is no way to identify which specific line of dialogue the player is on, saving only saves the last label the player started, not the exact line they reached
A save slot is an individual save file. Each game can have any amount of save slots. There are two different ways save slots are managed, depending on how the game is configured:
manual: This is the default mode. In this mode, there is a single global auto save used no matter which save gets loaded, but manual saves won't be overwritten unless the player chooses to overwrite them. TLDR: Only one global autosave.. There is a fixed amount of save slots for the game. This is how most interactive fictions work.game-slots: An alternative mode where starting a new game will create an Autosave slot for that playthrough, which will keep getting overwritten as the player goes. Starting a new game creates a separate new autosave slot for that playthrough. When the player loads a slot, autosaves will overwrite that slot automatically TLDR: One save slot per playthrough. Example: Zelda, Dark Souls
This value can be changed in
config.yaml in saves.mode:config.yaml
saves:
mode: manual
slots: 10
If using
manual mode, you should give the player a chance to create manual saves sometimes, as there is only one autosave which can get overwritten by starting a new gameTo let the player save manually, there are two commands:
Because save data is only generated when jumping to a new label, save prompts should ideally be at the start of a label. Otherwise, the data saved will be outdated.
We could save the dialog line number the player is at, but it would cause issues with game updates. Say the player is at line 53 of
some_script.nar, but you update the game and the code changes. Suddenly line 53 refers to a completely different bit of dialogue.One solution could be to give every line of dialogue a unique identifier (which would also allow for localisation), but this would be very tedious for users and isn't planned at the moment.
The only viable solution for saving without risk of game updates breaking past saves
This means some dialogue will be replayed when a user reloads if they were halfway through a label, but it's only because the save was made at a point in time.
Last modified 7mo ago